Cnet: At&T Mobility to buy out T-Mobile USA

[mrstickball]

disolitude said:

SamuelRSmith said:

disolitude said:

I don't get this... What does Tmobile have that AT&T wants to take over? Or make dissapear?

I used to do Tmobile tech support back in 2004...good times. I'm lying it was terrible...

AT&T have become the largest provider in the USA. They've gone from being 2nd in a race with 4ish players, to 1st in a race with 2.5 players (Sprint cannot compete, anymore). So, it's basically gone from a fairly uncompetitive market, anyways, to an effective duopoly. That's what AT&T gains.

Are there any smaller players in the USA's mobile game? In Canada doors were wide open a year ago and we got Wind mobile, Koodo, Mobilicity, public mobile... They are killing the big 3 here...at least in the major markets, since they don't have coverage outside major cities.

We have multiple smaller carriers like US Cellular, Virgin Mobile, and a few others. AT&T and T-Mo are the only GSM-band carriers in the States.

There are also a lot of spin-offs like Boost which use the Sprint network, and Straight Talk systems that piggyback both AT&T and Verizon's backbone.

Some analysts have noted that it is likely that US Cellular and the other smaller CDMA companies, sans Sprint, will join together and become what T-Mo was as the value leader, now that T-Mo will likely be forced to adopt AT&T's horrendous pricing policies.

As a T-Mobile user, I'm apalled that this happened. Although they were CDMA, I would of greatly prefered a merger between Sprint and T-Mo instead of AT&T which is the worst American cell provider.

Alternatively, I could see Sprint joining with the other non-Verizon CDMA providers to become the 3rd-way value leader, which would be pretty good as Sprints service is halfway decent, but vastly cheaper at $70 for unlimited everything (Unlimited everything is $100-$120 from Verizon and AT&T).